Page 21 - Microsoft Word - Thinking like a wallaby 14DEC16.doc

Chapter 4. See how they work

Of course, you won’t need to use all those ways of thinking for each problem. The idea is
to choose the ones that are the most useful for the sort of problem you need to solve.

For instance, when I wrote this book, I didn’t need to use elephant-thinking because

there was no history of the problem to worry about. The book was simply something I

wanted to write and the problem was to make it the best I could do. But I did need a lot
of Monkey-thinking, taking the different bits apart and then putting them back together

in a different way, and leaving some stuff out because it wasn’t needed. And there were

quite a few ‘ants’ involved, helping me with ideas and editing and so on.

Which animal should you start with?

There is no particular order in which to use each way of thinking. You might need to use
them in a different order each time, depending on what sort of problem you have.

Mostly, it’s good to start with Eagle-thinking because it helps you to understand the

problem better, but you might want to start the more tricky kinds of problem with

Spider-thinking, talking it over with someone before you even start to look at the
problem.

Now it’s time to look at each one of these ways of thinking in more detail (well, we
might give the crocodile, the cow and the goat a miss!) and to see how they can help us

solve problems. We’ll do this by thinking about some problems that are mostly made up.

The four problems that we will look at are useful ones to show how the different types

of animal thinking can be put into action.

You will probably see that each problem appears more difficult than the one before.

Problem 1 seems fairly simple and doesn’t involve too much hard thinking. Problem 4,

though, could be really difficult to deal with because of the feelings of the people
involved. Perhaps you have been lucky and never had a problem about money or

friends. If so, use your imagination and try to think what it would be like to be faced with

these types of problem.

17